Unrequited Love: When What We Love Isn’t Good For Us

It is August, and in New Brunswick that means it is corn season. I love corn season! There is nothing to equal the taste of a freshly boiled corn-on-the-cob rolled liberally in butter and salted to perfection! Let’s pause and give thanks to God for creating such an amazing food!

OK, so my problem is that some years ago I began to have problems digesting corn. I love corn, but corn doesn’t love me. I won’t gross you out with details, suffice to say that I am now at the point where I know for a fact that I will suffer significantly if I even eat a tiny serving of niblet corn and a fresh cob is really out of the question. But then I start to think or say, “it is sooo good !”…”maybe this time it will be ok”…”what is a little pain anyway?” The end of this story is probably quite clear to you already. Of course, I end up eating the corn and I enjoy it so much at the time.

My village has an annual corn boil at the community hall around the corner from our home. What I should do is not even drive by the hall on corn boil night. Most of the year I don’t have any real problem avoiding eating corn. The only other challenge is the corn chowder at the fall bazaar.

We all have our issues like this. Things that we enjoy so much even though they’re not good for us. Of course many of those issues are a fair bit more important, dangerous, unethical or even illegal. That is why in the Lord’s prayer it is so important that we have the line, “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.”

2 responses to “Unrequited Love: When What We Love Isn’t Good For Us”

I have been “bothered” by the phrase “Lead us not in temptation” recently. This implies that God would normally lead us into temptation and that we are praying that He not do so. Wouldn’t “Keep us from temptation” or “Through your grace, may we resist temptation” be a more appropriate contemporary translation? I found the insights on the following website helpful in thinking this through: http://www.allaboutprayer.org/lead-us-not-into-temptation-faq.htm.

I don’t usually think of it as God actually setting the temptation there as some kind of test and really think, “help me to resist temptation” even as I say the other phrase. The new version in the Book of Praise says, “Save us from the time of trial.”